Accel World - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.7

7

…Forty-five, forty six, forty-seven… Eyes closed, he counted innocently. Forty-eight, forty-nine…fifty.

He slowly opened his eyes.

Round white table. It looked a lot like the ones in the lounge at school. On the table was a glass of orange juice with a third or so of the juice left. On the other side, an empty chair.

He blinked rapidly and absently surveyed his surroundings. A cafeteria. At the other tables, young people his age and older customers were enjoying a brief afternoon respite, paper media in hand.

I…I came here to duel. To replenish my few remaining burst points…I asked for the protection of the bouncer and fought together as a tag team…and we won. Right, we won. We got my points back up to seventy. Now I don’t have to be freaked about total loss anymore.

The details of the fight were strangely hazy. In fact, it was like the memory flowed away along the edge when he tried to recall it. However, rather than thinking this strange, Haruyuki clenched both hands and held them up in a pose of determination.

“I’m totally never leveling up by accident again!” he said in a quiet voice, and he hurriedly dropped his head at the doubtful stares he got from the people around him. Perhaps because of his immense relief, he was suddenly starving, and though he drained the remaining juice in the glass in a single gulp, it was still very much not enough.

I’ll have a hamburger or something when I report to Takumu on the mission’s success.

With this thought, Haruyuki threw himself to his feet. Befitting a cafeteria run by a bookstore, a paper bill had been inserted into the glass cylinder on the table. He pulled it out and checked it, but all it said, of course, was one orange juice at 380 yen.

He settled up at the register—although this at least was through his Neurolinker—and rode the elevator down to the first floor. He passed the new releases display and headed outside. Pulling his head in at the chilly November wind, he crossed the road at the Suruga Daishita intersection just as the light turned green.

Takumu was waiting in a fast-food place immediately on the other side. He snaked through the crowd and went to slip through the large automatic door. There was a woman coming out of the shop at the same time, so he stepped to one side and let her pass. Her inward-curling hair shook a dozen centimeters or so to the side, and a faint fragrance drifted up.

Pssh. Pssh pssh.

Abruptly, he felt like he heard the light babbling of a stream, and Haruyuki stopped in front of the automatic door.

“Huh?” He looked back, but of course, there was no water flowing there. The sun was shining, and the tiles of the sidewalk were dry.

He thought that maybe someone had spilled a bottle of some drink, but there was no sign of anything like that. An older person carrying a bag with the logo of the bookstore on it, a group of foreigners who looked like tourists visiting the bookstore district that was Jimbocho, a girl in a peacoat moving away at a brisk pace—no one appeared to have heard the sound.

Guess I imagined it.

Turning around, Haruyuki forgot about the water and hurried through the automatic door of the hamburger shop. When he looked around, the sight of his friend waving his left hand wildly from a seat near the window leapt into view.

He had apparently already guessed that the mission had gone well from the look on Haruyuki’s face. Even still, Haruyuki popped up the thumb on his right hand.

He made a beeline for Takumu, whose fine features were wrinkled up in laughter almost to the point of tears.